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Recap: The Pay TV Show 2018

Attendees gather at the first-ever, sold-out Pay TV Show in Denver. (Jeremiah Batucan)

FierceVideo and FierceCable hosted The Pay TV Show in Denver this week. The event brought together top executives to discuss the innovative technologies, strategies and business models that companies are using to compete in what has become a very disrupted marketplace. Get a full recap of the event from the archived live blog, below. (All article timestamps below are Mountain Time.)

DENVER—With more than a half-dozen virtual pay TV services offering similar skinny bundles of channels and roughly congruent price points, Fierce Editor-in-Chief Mike Dano asked a panel of video industry analysts which vMVPD will be the first to succumb.

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DENVER—Cable executives typically talk around the question when asked about the potential threat of 5G wireless to their broadband businesses. So credit Roger Seiken, WideOpenWest's senior VP of video programming, for coming right out and saying what pretty much everyone in the cable industry is thinking.

DENVER—Over the past dozen or so years, providers ranging from RealNetworks to Netflix have helped push the streaming video market forward significantly, such that today SVOD providers can stream on-demand HD content to millions of users over the public internet without breaking much of a technological sweat. The same, however, is not true about live content.

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DENVER—Virtual pay TV services have an advantage in program licensing negotiations due to their far lower customer acquisition costs, said Tim Connolly, senior VP and head of distribution and partnerships for Hulu.

DENVER—Players in the pay TV industry expect to see dramatic growth in the market for addressable advertising, but the technology might not take over every single advertisement and broadcast in the space.

DENVER—European satellite distribution company SES said it has secured the largest commercial deployment yet for its turnkey Ultra HD service, with Ft. Lauderdale, Florida-based operator Hotwire advancing from the trial phase of the service.

Denver—Just as his boss did in December, when he announced T-Mobile's acquisition of Layer3, Jeff Binder used a fireside chat at The Pay TV Show in Denver to promise disruption. But questions remain about what the platform will look like.

Denver—Richard Au, Amazon's director of Prime Video Channels and Sports in the U.S., said his company would be open to integrating its Prime Video service on pay-TV platforms. He added that Amazon is not trying to replace traditional TV.

DENVER—Despite a published report last week that his company’s WorldBox 2.0 is still a few months away, Gary Schanman, senior VP of video products for Charter Communications, said the second-generation set-top is already being deployed in the market.

Sky’s Andrew Olson: For a long time, the set-top is going to be critical b/c it’s still technically key for quality & seamless UX. But as time moves on, we think of ourselves as an entertainment co., so when we don’t need a set-top, we won’t have one. #PayTVShow#paytv18

Liberty Global’s Bob Greene: Re social, a lot of difficulty in bringing that into the platform - there’s no metadata with it, much of it’s replaceable, some of it is already viewed in the ‘right’ place. #PayTVShow#PAYTV18

DENVER—Brett Sappington, senior director of research at Parks Associates, kicked off the first annual Pay TV Show with a session detailing some of the emerging challenges and opportunities for the pay TV space.

I'm psyched to be talking "MVPD Roundtable: Innovating in a New Age of Television" with @bigvongo@foxtel Michael Ivanchenko, Andrew Olson from Sky and @GetSpectrum Gary Schanman here at #PAYTV18